“I ain’t guilty!” Danvers shouted.
The judge turned to face the men of the jury. “How do you find?”
“Guilty!” Red called.
“Hang the son of a bitch!” Hezekiah ordered.
And so it went.
The hurdy-gurdy ladies and shopkeepers were hauled off in wagons. Smoke didn’t ask where they were being taken because he really didn’t care. The bodies of the outlaws were tossed into a huge pit and dirt and gravel shoveled over them. “I’d like to keep my federal commission, Jim,” Smoke said. “I got a hunch this mess isn’t over.”
“Keep it as long as you like. You’re makin’ thirty a month and expenses.” He grinned and shook Smoke’s hand, then shook the hand of the ranger. “I’ll ride any trail with you boys any time.”
He wheeled his horse and was gone.
The wind sighed lonely over the deserted town as Smoke and York sat their horses on the hill overlooking the town. White Wolf and his people were moving into the town. The judge had ordered whatever money was left in the town to remain there. Let the Indians have it for their help in bringing justice to the godforsaken place, he had said.
Smoke waved at White Wolf and the chief returned the gesture. Smoke and York turned their horses and put their backs to Dead River.
“What is this?” York asked. “July, August…what? I done flat lost all track of the months.”
“I think it’s September. I think Sally told me the first month she felt she was with child was March. So if she’s going to have the baby the last part of October…”
York counted on his fingers, then stopped and looked at Smoke. “Do you want March as one?”
“Damned if I know!”
“We’ll say you do.” He once more began counting. “Yep. But that’d be eight months. So this might be August.”
Smoke looked at him. “York…what in the hell are you talking about?”
York confessed that what he knew about the process of babies growing before the birth was rather limited.
“I think I better wire Sally and ask her,” Smoke suggested.
“I think that’d be the wise thing to do.”
Jim Wilde had told Smoke he would send a wire to Sally, telling her the operation was over and Smoke was all right. And he would do the same for York, advising the Arizona Ranger headquarters that York was in pursuit of those who had escaped.
Smoke and York cut across the Sangre de Cristo range, in search of the cave Davidson and his men had used to escape.
Sally got the wire one day before the Boston and New York newspapers ran the front-page story of the incident, calling it: JUSTICE AT DEAD RIVER. The pictures would follow in later editions.
John read the stories, now carried in nearly all papers in the East, and shook his head in disbelief, saying to his daughter, “Almost fifty men were hanged in one morning. Their trials took an average of three minutes per man. For God’s sake, Sally, surely you don’t agree with these kangaroo proceedings?”
“Father,” the daughter said, knowing that the man would never understand, “it’s a hard land. We don’t have time for all the niceties you people take for granted back here.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your husband, Smoke, is credited—if that’s the right choice of words—with killing some thirty or forty men?”
Sally shook her head. “No. I don’t see why it should. You see, Father, you’ve taken a defense attorney’s position already. And you immediately condemned Smoke and the other lawmen and posse members, without ever saying a word about those poor people who were kidnapped, enslaved, and then hung up on hooks to die by slow torture. You haven’t said a word about the people those outlaws abused, robbed, murdered, raped, tortured, and then ran back to Dead River to hide and spend their ill-gotten gain. Even those papers there,” she pointed, “admit that every man who was hanged was a confessed murderer, many of them multiple killers. They got whatever they deserved, Father. No more, and no less.”
The father sighed and looked at his daughter. “The West has changed you, Sally. I don’t know you anymore.”
“Yes, I’ve changed, Father,” she admitted. “For the better.” She smiled. “It’s going to be interesting when you and Smoke meet.”
“Yes,” John agreed. “Quite.”
It took Smoke and York three days after crossing the high range to find the cave opening and the little valley beneath it.
“Slick,” York said. “If they hadn’t a knocked down the bushes growin’ in front of the mouth of that cave, we’d have had the devil’s own hard time findin’ it.”
The men entered the cave opening, which was barely large enough to accommodate a standing man. And they knew from the smell that greeted them what they would find.
They looked down at the bloated and maggot-covered bodies on the cave floor.
“You know them?” Smoke asked.
“I seen ’em in town. But I never knowed their names. And I don’t feel like goin’ through their pockets to find out who they was, do you?”
Smoke shook his head. Both men stepped back outside, grateful to once more be out in the cool, fresh air. They breathed deeply, clearing their nostrils of the foul odor of death.
“Let’s see if we can pick up a trail,” Smoke suggested.
Old Preacher had schooled Smoke well. The man could track a snake across a flat rock. Smoke circled a couple of times, then called for York to join him.
“North.” He pointed. “I didn’t think they’d risk getting out into the sand dunes. They’ll probably follow the timber line until they get close to the San Luis, then they’ll ride the river, trying to hide their tracks. I’ll make a bet they’ll cut through Poncha Pass, then head east to the railroad town. They might stop at the hot springs first. You game?”
“Let’s do it.”
They picked up and lost the tracks a dozen times, but it soon became apparent that Smoke had pegged their direction accurately. At a village called Poncha Springs, past the San Luis Valley, Smoke and York stopped and re-supplied and bathed in the hot waters.
Yes, about a dozen hard-looking men had been through. Oh, five or six days back. They left here ridin’ toward Salida. They weren’t real friendly folks, neither. Looked like hardcases.
Smoke and York pulled out the next morning.
At Salida, they learned that Davidson and his men had stopped, bought supplies and ammunition, and left the same day they’d come.
But one man didn’t ride out with the others.
“He still in town?” Smoke asked.
“Shore is. Made his camp up by the Arkansas. ’Bout three miles out of town. But he’s over to the saloon now.”
Salida was new and raw, a railroad town built by the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. Salida was the division point of the main line and the narrow-gauge lines over what is called Marshall Pass.
“What’s this ol’ boy look like?” York asked.
The man described him.
“Nappy,” Smoke said. “You got papers on him?”
“’Deed I do,” York said, slipping the hammer thong off his .44.
“I’ll back you up. Let’s go.”
“You look familiar, partner,” the citizen said to Smoke. “What might be your name?”
“Smoke Jensen.”
As soon as the lawmen had left, the man hauled his ashes up and down the muddy streets, telling everyone he could find that Smoke was in town.
“I know Nappy is wanted for rape and murder,” Smoke said. “What else did he do?”
“Killed my older brother down between the Mogollon Plateau and the Little Colorado. Jimmy was a lawman, workin’ out of Tucson. Nappy had killed an old couple just outside of town and Jimmy had tracked him north.” York talked as they walked. “Nappy ambushed him. Gut-shot my brother and left him to die. But Jimmy wasn’t about to die ’fore he told who done him in. He crawled for miles until some punchers found him and he could tell them what happened, then he died. I was fifteen at the time. I joined the Rangers when I was eighteen. That was six years ago.”